Self-Abasing Gestures and Canine Loyalties

Barbie is Kevin's kind of conservative.

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It’s the never-ending story with Trump’s ongoing legal battles, but how exactly will the latest investigation impact Trump’s 2024 campaign? Kevin Williamson and Mike Warren join Sarah Isgur to break down the latest in MAGA land and:

-Kevin McCarthy’s lack of self-respect

-Ron DeSantis, so hot right now?

-The trouble with RE-words

-Nerds throwing punches

-Barbie’s CCP map

Show Notes:

-Sarah and Mike’s joint project

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Comments (68)
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  1. Dkellyiv

    Toward the end of the podcast Sarah was musing on why Hollywood hasn’t yet attempted to capitalize on conservatives, like the book publishing world did, 15-20yrs ago.

    Over the past few years there have been articles in The New York Times, USA Today, and Newsweek on how Hollywood has begun to create Christian imprints. Newsweek for example wrote:
    “ Consider that MGM, 21st Century Fox and Sony Pictures have each launched their own faith-based studios. Meanwhile, renowned director Martin Scorsese is planning a new film about Jesus and so is art house director Terrence Malick. And Netflix has said it is working on bringing more faith-based content to its platform as well.”

    While Christian isn’t the same thing as Conservative (I’ll let Kevin Williamson and David French tease that out), there’s certainly lots of overlap.

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    Jordan Caruso

    I gotta put in a word for Barbie. I’m a male. Late Millennial. I love good writing and looking behind a film at the decisions made in the process that resulted in it. To see what the makers are doing.

    I loved the movie. I don’t think it was “woke” or feminist in a negative way at all. Its feminism was proper and, I believe, packed really strong morals. It was not superficial or ideologically corrupted at all. Other than that, it was hilarious. Humor is very subjective, I died when Ryan Gosling said the line, “I’m a liberated man; I know crying’s not weak.” Just died laughing.

    Quality, respectable film, regardless of one’s preferences.

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    Kelvinktsang

    Would love to see Sarah go on a platonic date with Ben Shapiro to discuss Barbie.

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  4. Kathleen.Brown2021

    Barbie. Y’all missed the boat on this one and it was not worth my time. Had you watched the movie it would have been different.

    It was an homage to the girls who played with Barbie. We laughed and we cried. It places instark highlight the patriarchy vs a matriarchy and IMHO failed a bit by being so binary but in the end it reached detente. However, since you didn’t see it, and two of you are men, you missed the sweet message of the hope and aspirations we felt as little girls and young women when we thought the world was ours before the “real world” crashed in.

    It’s an astonishing movie for girls and women—the likes of which we RARELY see from Hollywood. Hats off to Greta Gerwg and Noah Baumbach. Not perfect but very good.

    PS I love all of you at the Dispatch. You just needed to do more homework on this one. ❤️

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  5. Clark.Monson

    I haven't seen either Barbie or Oppenheimer, and don't expect to see either. I did see Sound of Freedom over the weekend. It was a movie that I'm glad I saw, and I don't expect to see again for a long time. An understandably dark, very sad movie. It had its flaws, but I thought on the whole it was pretty well done.

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  6. Michael.Mcchesney

    I'm a little older than Kevin, so I was a bit older than he was when my parents took me to see One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I was 7. I absolutely HATED that movie. From everything I've heard as an adult, that is one of the great movies of all time. But the emotional scarring I received from that movie as a 7-year-old has kept me from watching it again as an adult.

    My father loved movies but hated going to the movies alone. Sometimes I would get to go because my Dad didn't want to pay a babysitter. Often there would be movies my mother wasn't interested in, so he would bring me and/or my brothers to see films we were clearly too young to watch. As much as I hated One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, I was usually really happy to be able to see R-rated movies. My favorite inappropriate R-rated film had to be The Kentucky Fried Movie. That film is a comedy with various parodies of movies and the movie-going experience. One of those was a trailer parody of an X-rated movie, “Catholic High School Girls in Trouble.” I was 9 years old when my Dad took me to see it. I was 13 when he took my younger brother and me to see Richard Pryor Live On The Sunset Strip. My brothers were 10 and 7. But unlike my experience with Cuckoo's Nest, my youngest brother really seemed to like it. He was laughing all the way through it. But after we left the theater, he said, “He wasn't very funny. I just laughed because he said f*ck a lot.”

    As happy as I was when I was a kid to be able to watch inappropriate movies, I really think my parents should not have let me watch them until I was older. I never had kids of my own. I have a 6-year-old nephew, but my sister would kill me if I showed him an inappropriate film. My other sister is very careful about what her 2 girls watch. My oldest niece is 17 and is now able to watch almost anything she wants to. Fortunately, she has no interest in anything really inappropriate. Her younger sister is 13. I accidentally gave her an “adult” card game for her birthday a few weeks ago. Oops. I am hoping my sister will forgive me by the time my younger niece is 17.

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    Ethan Cordray

    My wife and I Barbenheimed yesterday, and it was great. We did Barbie first, ate lunch, then did Oppenheimer. I think that's the best order.

    Barbie is interesting, and has a lot of funny gags, but I ultimately didn't really find it very coherent. Like commenter Susanbruxvoort.Lipscomb says, it tries to both critique and celebrate Barbie in different ways, and relate the Barbie concept to the more complicated realities of female experience. But I don't think it really adds up of a clear statement of anything at the end.

    Ken's arc, of going from post-masculine uselessness to cartoon patriarchy to disappointment to accepting Barbie's value is both funnier than Barbie's story, and also more intellectually interesting. But it also doesn't really quite pay off with a final resolution. Ken maybe could have realized that he has his own value that doesn't depend on his relationship to Barbie, or that there can be a form of masculine power that isn't zero-sum with feminine power, or something else -- but he just kinda---doesn't? He finds some kind of vague contentment with just being Ken, and he stops feeling bad, but it's not exactly clear what that means for him.

    The biggest problem with the movie is that it's got too many things going on, so it doesn't really have time to deal with any one issue completely. You've got Barbie's discovery of human complexity; Ken's sexual/political frustration; the real-people mother/daughter conflict; the Mattel executives (did they...learn something? If so, what?); the resentment among the Kens, etc. So many plots and conflicts and themes, and they just don't really get the time to work any of them out.

    And then, Oppenheimer.

    Oppenheimer is great. Nolan in top form, Cillian Murphy presumably winning an Oscar, RDJ maybe doing the same. It is a very complicated movie about a very complicated subject, but so well made, beautiful, and elegant that I never got lost and I never got tired.

    It is a movie about a difficult man grappling with difficult moral questions, and it has no simple moral conclusion. You have to decide for yourself what to take away from it.

    My wife and I have both been ruminating on it ever since -- partially, by reading the vast array of moronic Twitter takes on it, which misunderstand the movie from every conceivable direction. It exposes how incredibly illiterate we've become, under the impulse to fit great art into neat ideological boxes of "good" or "evil."

    So, two movies, both of which lack obvious coherent messages, but one for bad reasons and one for good reasons. For the double feature, see Oppenheimer second, so you can sit with it as long as it deserves.

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  8. Susanbruxvoort.Lipscomb

    I saw the Barbie movie on Friday evening at drive-in. From my lawn chair on the grass, there were two group of young people on blankets in front of me. A group of teenage girls who came in all-pink get-ups and were clearly ready to celebrate Barbie. And a group of non-binary youth who were there, I think, for the hype. By the end of the movie, neither group was paying attention. They had all gotten out their phones and were chatting among themselves. Because this movie was not for them. They didn't get it. And it was excellent. It's a movie about what it means to be a woman--in all the messy, complicated, hard ways. The movie offered a critique of the celebratory "Barbie means that women can do anything" and a critique of the "Barbie is a tool of male-gaze oppression." Spoiler alert. By the end of the movie, Barbie becomes an actual woman. With a vagina. And that's important. This is not a movie just about gender (although it is that). It's a movie about sex. What it means to be a biological woman who can have children, can change, can grow old, and can't do everything. It's also a movie, surprisingly, about Ken and what happens to men in an age when women are celebrated and men aren't sure what they should do with themselves. I recently read Richard Reeve's book, On Boys and Men, and the depiction of Ken could have been taken from Reeve's pages. I don't fully endorse Gerwig's ultimate vision because she offers Barbieland as a kind of consumerist escape, a "treat yo-self" place for real women to go on holiday from the real world and she offers no vision for male-female partnerships that form coherent families. But in many ways this is a conservative movie. And it's really excellent. Just not for the kids.

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    Joe Delanis

    I'm curious about KDW's undefeated season.

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    1. Kevin Williamson

      Would have been my sophomore year, I believe. Had a really good regular season but didn't make it through regionals or whatever it was that came next. Wrestling was always my sport, to the extent that I had one; I played football, of course, Texas being Texas, but that was pro forma.

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        Joe Delanis

        It doesn't surprise me at all that wrestling was your sport. From what I recall of my high school years, the football players were pack mentality types - they enjoyed dressing alike, having the same tastes in music, etc. Any one of them doing something to differentiate himself from his friends/teammates was anathema. Whereas the wresters generally weren't interested in trying to be like one another. And you've never struck me as a follower type.

        How did you wrestle stylistically? Were you more of a throw or shot guy (upper weights weren't usually the latter), straight offense vs counter wrestler, etc?

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        1. Kevin Williamson

          Depended on the other guy, to an extent. I'd usually start pretty aggressive and, if that didn't work, later hang back and wait for an opportunity.

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  10. Ed_Hist

    Hey Sarah, don't see either of those movies before you see "Spiderman: Across the Spider verse" (assuming you have seen "SPiderman, into the Spiderverrse"--if you haven't, see it first). Best superhero movies of the last decade

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      Ethan Cordray

      I mean...it's not the best superhero movie of the last decade, but only because "Into the Spider-Verse" is slightly better than "Across the Spider-Verse" and it came out in 2018. Other than that, though, I completely agree.

      EDIT: I just saw that you said "best superhero movies" (plural, not singular). Objection withdrawn, you are correct.

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